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NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP

NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP at Heaven Gallery

Gwynne Johnson, Jessica Bardsley, Ashley Thomas

October 18^th, 2013

Gwynne Johnson

Somewhere Beyond Myself I Wait For My Arrival, 2013

The viewer crosses the gallery room, atop the scuffed and splintered wooden floor, beneath the coffered ceiling to confront the white walls, refaced in spite of the old pipelines in odd corners of the space.  The floor is one you would never want to touch, the gallery is made into a creepy place in light of the work—one may really only feel safe looking at the work illuminated by a familiar track lighting situation.  An SAIC media center projector sits atop a dirtied (once white) pedestal, its cord taped crudely to the floor.

One is confronted with Ashley Thomas’ graphite drawing Flowers upon entering the main room of the gallery. The page is filled with gray charcoal.  The charcoal reflects the lighting overhead to reveal a curvature in the installation of the drawing, tacked into the wall by copper nails. The drawing of a vase of flowers appears as a study defined by negative space.  We are given access to the entire paper, and the piece immediately conjures memories of attempting studies from life in a beginning drawing course.  One can picture the artist with a gray-dusted hand rubbing out the highlights with a kneaded eraser.

The image's darkness and shape of the black and white study is mimicked in the shiny black acrylic frame of the nearby hanging Untitled found-image collages.  The frame looks to be unevenly poured resin and has a wavy, shiny surface.  Two black and white printed bouquets stand next to each other against a paint-blackened background, the glossy brush stokes of which are visible in the reflected light.  The clippings appear as studies as well, existing in appropriate size to an encyclopedic reference image.  These three bouquets are de-romanticized , and are presented more as anatomy illustrations that emphasize the floral arrangement.

Attention is moved to the dirtied projector’s occupation of space and its projected video by Jessica Bardsley.  The 16mm film A Past of Plank and Nail moves through a still home and its still life moments, appearing as a record of the space.  The house is Emily Dickinson’s, now a museum that portrays the absence of its inhabitants.  The residual objects evoke a presence, or perhaps a soul that Emily Dickinson speaks of in a poem referenced in the title of Bardsley's work:

The Props assist the House (729)

By Emily Dickinson

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter –

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness – then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul –

One comes away with images of the video study like the fireplace and its mantle, the white dress floating in the room, and the cracked toile-covered wall.

These images are carried into the next room of the gallery, across the cracked wood floor, and referenced in viewing the work the viewer finds there.  A row of matte-black square images hang in succession and pull the eye toward their luminous lunar subjects.  Gwynne Johnson's series Milk Moons charts lunar phases in human breast milk, with a matte black abyss of the background akin to the surface of Thomas’ graphite drawings.  A close inspection reveals a surface that looks like finely crushed obsidian, and perhaps calls attention to the mineral nature of the milk.  The photographs are hung frame to frame in a linear fashion, yet some fall slightly out of the arrangement and a bit off kilter.  Though unsubstantiated by intent, the display leads to the subjective sneaking through an attempt at objectivity, the study made personal.

Once again looking around the room, the eyes turn to a grand piano covered in a black tarp, pushed aside toward the window in the gallery.  Night Without Sleep seems to request a solitary viewer, alone in the gallery.  The lighting begs to be dimmed and dramatized, the piano an f-sharp minor scale, and a small spotlight on the white-washed pipes in the corner of the room. 

[History] Under Construction
Kayla Anderson, Slaveya Minkova, Emma Robbins
Gallery X
1
Late 20th Century. Bulgaria.
Girl bundles
 red cloth archeology

Still from Archolapse (Video) by Slaveya Minkova

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Storm Pattern Rug IV
Navajo
Early 20th Century
genuine antique navajo rug, bleached flour


10/25/2013
Specimens from the 1333 N. Campbell Home. Various specimens preserved. 
The objects displayed have been recovered from a residential home in and of Chicago in early 21st century

afterthoughts on Hito Steyerl

“Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.” (Hito Steyerl)

This is a weird idea that Hito Steyerl proposes. If there is no ground to fall toward, there is no sense of falling, and as such, as Steyerl proposes  “it could initiate a sensation of stasis.

Or, the void. Black holes. Vertigo.  This thought took me instantly to the Existential Void and the “malaise of existence.” It reminds me of dreams of free fall that are supposedly the mind’s symbolic way of alerting to a life situation that has grown out of control or things going downhill quickly. Furthermore, she suggests, that while one is falling, there is this feeling of “floating, or not moving at all,” brief moment of disorientation before on catches sight of what one is falling toward.

Steyerl claims that  “disorientation” happens “partly due to the loss of a stable horizon,” that is an idea I find very intruiging. In particular, the creation of an “artifical stable horizon.” A thought provoking claim is made here by Steyerl who relates the emergence of tools like …the sextant that allowed sailors to calculate the exact position to  “colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global market”. I was first reminded of Nietzsche, who writes in his essay Who killed God?, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? …… Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”

The problem with linear perspective is, according to Steyerl, typically disregarded. The horizon is conceived as an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge.

The vertical perspective, or the lack of lines coalescing into a horizontal line reminded me of photographs by Benny Lam, which are labeled with a QR code which opens up to a petition to the Hong Kong government for better living conditions for the lower and middle-lower income residents of Hong Kong.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries/9888398/Overhead-photos-of-cramped-apartments-in-Hong-Kong.html

According to Steyerl, ‘the perspective from above establishes an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground, which for her creates a visual “normality – a new subjectivity that is folded into surveillance technology and screen-based distraction”

This brings to mind images that one has seen by drones, like the Gorgon Stare, that has spherical array of nine cameras attached to it, which allow the viewer to observe 12 different perspectives at any time.

For Steyerl “montage becomes a perfect device for destabilizing the observers’ perspective and breaking down linear time.”

She points to the film “Enter the Void” by Gaspar Noé: A gaze that penetrates space from the perspective of a disembodied point of view as it travels rapidly from past to present in continuous blur and rapid velocity. The sense of verticality is amplified by aerial shots from bird’s eye view and sense of gravity is lost by the camera’s frequent rotation. Most perspectives are shot from bird’s eye view as the camera travels through buildings, walls, and corridors.  

Steyerl poses interesting questions here, such as “do these tropes, allegorized in a single  (and frankly, god-awful) movie be expanded into a more general analysis of disembodies hovering point of views? Moreover, “ do the aerial views, drone perspectives, and 3-D dives into abysses stand in for the gazes of “dead white males,” a worldview that lost its vitality, yet persist as an undead but powerful tool to police the world and control its own reproductions?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJkPLYmUyzg

Versions

I think ignorance of copyright and art market debate is beneficial to my health and happiness.

I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about finding it.” Is the artist as creator a thing of the past?

Some of my favorite exhibitions don’t make clear distinctions between those fields, incorporating works by journalists, architects, musicians, etc. I think it is a more interesting strategy to curate works, instead of being involved in a scene or a CV

(Oliver Laric)

In the landscape of contemporary art, I find Oliver Laric’s work most compelling right now because he makes visible what  often goes unnoticed: the borrowed image or gesture. Luis Borges once claimed that translations produce new works. Oliver Laric’s work very much reflects this idea. He uses existing images to create new images, whereby the destruction of one image creates another image, just as with iconoclasm.

“If you are looking for a brilliant statement on the visual culture of the Internet age, or an in-depth analysis of its historical roots in Western culture, I couldn’t suggest anything better.” Laric’s Versions are a two-channel video, a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a novel, a recipe a play, a dance routine, a feature film and a merchandise.

It challenges current modes of creative production and the hierarchies of an “authentic,” or original image. It dismisses the idea of the original and suggests a new look at image making, one in which pirate copies and appropriations gradually replace the original in a digitized aged.

Laric uses found material from places like youtube, Flickr, Google, 4chan, 3Dwarehouse and fuses high and low art images with philosophy and critical theory.

http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm

His work contemplates how we experience images today, how they are mediated, he states, “Some of my favorite artworks and movies have only been described to me. A description can generate new work while acting as a portrait of the person retelling the idea, plot, etc.”

http://vimeo.com/17815471

http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/56398/timeline.html
http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm

Laric takes the idea of deinstitutionalization of an artwork the whole way in his project Biennale Online 2013, which is an incomplete, partially outlined timeline of online exhibitions between the years 1991 and 2013. This, naturally,  is not an authoritative history of an online exhibition but rather Laric’s very own reiteration of ahistorical propositions. Laric consulted with artists and curators as, for instance, the New Museum’s Curator Lauren Cornell, who has herself started a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue, called Open Curating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.